Peter Graham was born in London. He joined the British army as a bandsman and later studied formally in Australia. He studied at IRCAM (Paris) and with the Groupe De Recherches Musicales (GRM), Radio France. Graham’s works have been performed in Australia and overseas including performances by Australia Felix and at the Almeida Festival.

Peter Graham (pseudonym of Jaroslav Stastny-Pokorny) was born on 1st July, 1952 in Brno and studied organ at the Brno Conservatory, from where he went on to study composition under Alois Pinos at the Janacek Academy of Performing Arts, also in Brno. On ocompleting his studies he worked temporarily in quite a mumber of capacities - as a repetiteur at the Conservatory, in theatre, as as a music director in radio, as an employeed of the Czech Music Fund and as a music school teacher. At the present he works for the Czech TV in Brno. His greatest interest, however, is in composition. Graham says of his own music, that it “grows as does timber in a forest”, without predetermined plans and goals. He is concerned with creation itself rather than with the cultivation of the personality: “I am what I do.” Several of his works have met with success at performances in Great Britain, Germany, Poland, Austria, Italy, Romania, Holland, Sweden, France and USA. In 1993 his chamber cantata Der Erste gained him second prize in the Musica iudaica festival ‘s international competition for works on texts by Franz Kafka.
Web: http://www.musica.cz/graham/index.html